Those Eyes - Do They Make Your Heart Tender, Too?

If in your heart you make a manger for his bed,

Then God will once again become a child on earth.

A song by Ana Hernandez has been my earworm for the last week, which no doubt influenced my reading of the first meditation from Waiting and Watching: Advent Word Reflections.

This project that is creating an international community of prayer uses one word each day between now and Christmas to focus our meditation, our prayer, and our practice in the Way of Jesus. A poster to color available from Forward Movement provides another way to pray, with colored pencils.

The keyword for the First Sunday of Advent is Tender, and my first foray into this meditating with colored pencils is above. Now I don't mean to make some kind of association between the Mandalorian's Child and Ana Hernandez' Child -- except for where the word tender took me.

Babies in cages is the phrase that sums my heart sickness of the last four years. What damage has been done to how many souls in the United States, that people ever came to believe it was okay to tear refugee children away from their parents in order to discourage their parents from their legal efforts to seek asylum? It is legal to cross a nation's border, however you cross it, whether you fly, drive, boat, swim, walk, or run, and ask for asylum.

Over against those damaged hearts, Baby Yoda has entered our collective imagination. And the Mandalorian, a professional bounty hunter and assassin, assigned to turn this child over for some unknown purpose, rebels. He does not obey orders. And so his life changes. The hunter becomes the hunted, as he steals the child back and flees, like parents flee across borders, like one family in particular fled to Egypt so many years ago, to protect it.

I have heard that some people employed by Homeland Security also chose not to obey orders. They resigned in protest of the policy of family separation.

It's those eyes, I think, those innocent eyes that call out the tenderness from the hardest of hearts. They are dangerous, those eyes.

Another Christmas hymn, my favorite, contains this verse:

O Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray.

Cast out our sin, and enter in. Be born in us today.

It is dangerous to let a child in. It can change your life, that tenderness. It can make you fierce to protect the right.

Invited in often enough, that Child is changing me.

So that is my first effort at Waiting and Watching, this season's Advent discipline. It is my intention, or at least my hope, to keep posting these reflections here, turning my sermon website into -- whatever this is. I am already a day behind. But maybe I'll catch up. Wish me luck.

And share it, if you find value here.